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[return to "Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs"]
1. thorum+ci[view] [source] 2026-01-19 23:35:27
>>Scramb+(OP)
Developed by Jordan Hubbard of NVIDIA (and FreeBSD).

My understanding/experience is that LLM performance in a language scales with how well the language is represented in the training data.

From that assumption, we might expect LLMs to actually do better with an existing language for which more training code is available, even if that language is more complex and seems like it should be “harder” to understand.

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2. cmrdpo+Rn[view] [source] 2026-01-20 00:26:11
>>thorum+ci
Not my experience, honestly. With a good code base for it to explore and good tooling, and a really good prompt I've had excellent results with frankly quite obscure things, including homegrown languages.

As others said, the key is feedback and prompting. In a model with long context, it'll figure it out.

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3. vidarh+8f1[view] [source] 2026-01-20 09:23:57
>>cmrdpo+Rn
Yeah, I've had Claude work on my buggy, incomplete Ruby compiler written (mostly) in Ruby, which uses an s-expression like syntax with a custom "mini language" to implement low-level features that can't be done (or is impractical to do) in pure Ruby, and it only had minor problems with the s-expression language that was mostly fixed with a handful of lines in CLAUDE.md (and were, frankly, mostly my fault for making the language itself somewhat inconsistent) and e.g. when it write a bigint implementation, I had to "tell it off" for too readily resorting to the s-expression syntax since it seemed to "prefer it" over writing high-level code in Ruby.
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